From Head to Toe. Human Images in the Focus of the Würth Collection + Photos!

September 28, 2012

As of yesterday, September 27, the German Würth Collection, encompassing works from Picasso, Ernst, Kapoor, Richter and now also Latvian op-art painter Ritums Ivanovs, opened an exhibition focusing on the human body from head to toe. The exhibition offers an entertaining challenge to discover clues in the current spectrum of artists' views of the world and obsessions

From time immemorial, representations of people have not only outwardly depicted them but lent cogent form to fundamental ideas about being human. While in earlier centuries the portrait genre in particular was predestined to reflect the human image, today art is increasingly turning to the human body as a whole.

The exhibition "From Head to Toe. Human Images in the Focus of the Würth Collection" invites you to a fascinating "scenic discourse" concerning the changes and constants in the human image, occupying 2,600 square meters at the Kunsthalle Würth. Paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations by more than 100 artists shed light from diverse points of view on the perception of and involvement with beauty, transcience, expressive force, self-questioning, and standardization of the human form. The exhibition, with its approximately 200 portraits and depictions of the figure, is capable of providing surprising new insights into its well-known incunabula. Yet the majority of the items, including spectacular recent acquisitions, have never before been on view at the Kunsthalle.

The exhibition focuses on works from the past 125 years, by artists including Claude-Émile Schuffenecker, Gustav Klimt, Wilhelm Trübner, Pablo Picasso, George Grosz, Christian Schad, Jaume Plensa, Tony Oursler, and Marc Quinn. Yet the point of departure is an idealized Fettered Slave by Leonhard Kern (1588–1662). The piece was created during a period in which no sharp dividing line was drawn between artificialia and naturalia, man-made and God-created things. Over the following centuries, when the theory of evolution, the results of epistemology, and the experience of world wars led to an abandonment of the notion of man as the crown of creation, artists began in the twentieth century to explore human extremes instead. Today, the borderline between the man-made and nature has again become so blurred that many speak of the post-biological age and the body as an option.

The exhibition offers an entertaining challenge to discover clues in the current spectrum of artists' views of the world and obsessions. Naturally it also represents another voyage of discovery through the Würth Collection, this time revealing shared and contrasting approaches to body and soul. Perhaps it may even occasionally succeed in making apparently unbridgeable gaps comprehensible.